[Update] The Crisis of the Confined Body: A Conference in Romance Studies / Abstract Deadline 1/24/10

full name / name of organization:

University of California, Berkeley

contact email:

spp_conf@berkeley.edu

The Crisis of the Confined Body is a graduate student conference that will join five Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), fostering a comparative approach to studies of the body in confinement, isolation and extraction. The conference will offer critical examinations of the body and its contingent relationship to spatial, temporal, cultural and/or linguistic parameters. A theme that lends itself to multiple fields, The Crisis of the Confined Body will promote interdisciplinary collaborations between the humanities, visual arts, and sciences, engaging points of overlap as well as lines of divergence. We encourage presentations that engage a comparative and/or interdisciplinary approach.

General thematic subcategories: (a) violence and discourse; (b) institutions and power; (c) the body and knowledge; and (d) the body and/in space

Examples of critical topics include, but are not limited to:

- The frontiers of the body
- Scientific discourse and the abnormal body
- The identity politics of the body (e.g. the tropologies of the veil)
- The segregation of racialized bodies
- The body and the social semiotics of language, or the social semiotics of the body
- Torture and testimony
- Mysticism and seclusion
- The psychology of confinement
- Technologies of surveillance and control
- The "War on Terror" and terrorist bodies
- Insurgent bodies and the body politic
- The embodiment of urban topographies/landscapes